“Ah!” Alfred exclaimed, suddenly serious. He gave her just a quick glance, then turned away. “Go ahead. I think it’s safe. I’ll make it safe by sitting here with my glass and keeping an eye on you. Be careful coming down the trail. Let the horse pick his way. That’s all.” She rode Majesty across the wide flat, up the zigzag trail, across the beautiful grassy level to the far rim of the mesa, and not till then did she lift her eyes to face the southwest. Madeline looked from the gray valley at her feet to the blue Sierra Madres, gold-tipped in the setting sun. Her vision embraced in that glance distance and depth and glory hitherto unrevealed to her. The gray valley sloped and widened to the black sentinel Chiricahuas, and beyond was lost in a vast corrugated sweep of earth, reddening down to the west, where a golden blaze lifted the dark, rugged mountains into bold relief. The scene had infinite beauty. But after Madeline’s first swift, all-embracing flash of enraptured eyes, thought of beauty passed away. In that darkening desert there was something illimitable. Madeline saw the hollow of a stupendous hand; she felt a mighty hold upon her heart. Out of the endless space, out of silence and desolation and mystery and age, came slow-changing colored shadows, phantoms of peace, and they whispered to Madeline. They whispered that it was a great, grim, immutable earth; that time was eternity; that life was fleeting. They whispered for her to be a woman; to love some one before it was too late; to love any one, every one; to realize the need of work, and in doing it to find happiness. She rode back across the mesa and down the trail, and, once more upon the flat, she called to the horse and made him run. His spirit seemed to race with hers. The wind of his speed blew her hair from its fastenings. When he thundered to a halt at the porch steps Madeline, breathless and disheveled, alighted with the mass of her hair tumbling around her. Alfred met her, and his exclamation, and Florence’s rapt eyes shining on her face, and Stillwell’s speechlessness made her self-conscious. Laughing, she tried to put up the mass of hair. “I must—look a—fright,” she panted. “Wal, you can say what you like,” replied the old cattleman, “but I know what I think.” Madeline strove to attain calmness. “My hat—and my combs—went on the wind. I thought my hair would go, too.... There is the evening star.... I think I am very hungry.” And then she gave up trying to be calm, and likewise to fasten up her hair, which fell again in a golden mass.